Schools can’t stop wondering what students do on Facebook

Teacher, leave those kids alone (on Facebook).

It's graduation season, which means that students, teachers, and administrators alike are all thinking about one thing: Facebook.

Schools around the globe have a fascination with—indeed, sometimes a fixation on—the social networking site and what their students are getting up to online. Questions about the appropriate response to student material on social networking sites have existed for years, but they're exploding into serious policy questions (and even laws) as such sites become almost ubiquitous teen hangouts.

For instance: can school administration use social networking to keeps tabs on what students do during the school day? What about things they do after leaving school property?

In the St. Louis suburb of Clayton, the big news this week was the resignation of Clayton High School's principal, Louise Losos. According to local paper the Post-Dispatch, someone named Suzy Harriston had made Facebook "friends" with more than 300 people, including many high school students, despite the fact that no one knew who she was. On April 5, the school's former quarterback claimed publicly that "Harriston" was really Losos. According to the paper:

The day after [the quarterback's] allegation, the district announced that the high school principal, Louise Losos, would begin a leave of absence the following Monday. For weeks, the district released no details about the leave. Then on Friday night, Losos resigned. The resignation is effective June 30. The district said the administration and Losos "had a fundamental dispute concerning the appropriate use of social media."

Schools (and courts) are hashing out the limits of social media use, but bright lines aren't always simple to draw. Actions performed "outside of school" can have significant "at school" repercussions. A few hours' drive northeast of St. Louis, the Chicago Sun-Timesreported this week on a girl-on-girl fight at the Chicago Academy of Advanced Technology.

Last Thursday, Jenise L. Williams, 16, a sophomore, was attacked in the school’s hallway by two or three juniors wielding locks in their hands. Apparently the attack was a response to a back-and-forth dispute on Facebook.

“They were on there calling my daughter a ho,” said Tracy Polk, the victim’s mother. “The girls beat her in the head with locks.”

Around the world, authorities have become concerned about "cyber-bullying," which can continue to reach kids even at night inside the "safety" of their homes. The concerns have recently led New Zealand, which has the world's highest suicide rate for young men, to consider new legislation that would outlaw "incitement to suicide," "maliciously impersonating another person," and "publishing intimate photos without consent." All are targeted at social media and text messaging.

The concern over such problems has led some to take fairly extreme measures to "save the children." The UK's Daily Mail, which has been leading a pressure campaign to give parents a way to block Internet pornography, provided the story this week of one Paul Woodward, a primary school "head" and a union official representing other "heads." Woodward is on a one-man crusade to get his young pupils kicked off Facebook, going so far as to call accounts for children under 13 (Facebook's minimum age in its Terms of Service) "illegal."

"The real concern is children being able to have Facebook accounts when they are not old enough, and parents condoning it. If my school is representative, it’s 60 percent at least have got access."

He said he had had cases where he told parents: "It’s illegal for you to do this, you shouldn’t be doing it for your child. You need to close down that account or I might have to tell the safeguarding people that you are exposing your child to stuff that’s not suitable."

As soon as his school becomes aware a child has a Facebook account it contacts the company to get the profile blocked.

In some cases, the main worry for the students comes from the school itself. A Catholic school in the Philippines prevented several male students from appearing onstage during graduation due to a Facebook photo that appeared to show them kissing one another (the students claimed it was simply a camera trick). This week, one student's mother took her complaint about this behavior to the country's Commission on Human Rights.

And, of course, teachers too have to be wary about their use of social media sites like Facebook. After a student drowned during a field trip, a New York city teacher posted a Facebook status message saying—one hopes in jest—"After today, I am thinking the beach sounds like a wonderful idea for my 5th graders! I HATE THEIR GUTS! They are the devils spawn!"

Evan Brown, a lawyer specializing in tech cases, notes that the court found her post "repulsive" but eventually agreed "that getting fired was too stiff a penalty. It found that the termination was so disproportionate to the offense, in the light of all the circumstances, that it was 'shocking to one’s sense of fairness.' The teacher had an unblemished record before this incident, and what’s more, she posted the content outside of school and after school hours. And there was no evidence it affected her ability to teach."

So many uses

Social media can go wrong in so many ways for students, teachers, and administrators, yet it can also be a terrific tool for bringing communities together and for strengthening relationships. And most of the issues here have analogues in the "grown-up" world of employer/employee relationships, and another set of analogues when it comes to government and intelligence agency use of social media posts to spot fake marriages, monitor "chatter," and even ban people from entering the country.

Of course, using Facebook for law enforcement isn't always controversial: does anyone think this guy shouldn't have been picked up after posting to Facebook a picture of himself siphoning gas out of a cop car?

When it comes to using social media for monitoring, where does your school, your employer, or your government draw the line? And where do you?